September 10, 2010

Surely, you haven't read them all. I'm not going to weigh them down just yet with a lot of new material on top. I'd rather call attention to the 2 posts about the small-time Florida pastor who captured the attention of the entire world — with the help of a lot of foolish journalists and the President of the United States.

Obama propounds the stereotype of irrational Muslims who resort to acts of violence when they don't like what people are saying.

Ironically, Rev. Jones wanted to burn the Koran because it seemed to him that it "incites radical, violent behavior among Muslims." And Obama wanted Jones to refrain from burning the Koran because it would incite radical, violent behavior among Muslims.

And here's a picture in the NYT showing a bunch of men posing in the embarrassing stereotype that the President isn't ashamed to use.

The Press hath decreed the narrative. Small-town Pastor that we have plucked out of obscurity will incite violence on other side of Earth. Accordingly, The Press must show a picture of unemployed men rioting in front of smoke.

If, weeks and months ago, even a fraction of the effort spent by President Obama, Secretary Gates, and so many others to convince Rev. Jones not to burn the Koran had been spent trying to convince Imam Rauf and the Park51 developers to move their site a bit farter away from Ground Zero, we would all be in a much better place right now.

Now that that's out of the way, let's look at the reactions to the proposal from everyone from the President to the AP to the Dept of Defense to Interpol. Standard issue Christophobia from each and every one of them. People are beginning to notice.

The "Arab street" depends on Community Organizers" (that's the best translation from Arabic available) whose job is to round up people when ever someone orders a demonstration. Notice there are 3 community organizers closest to the camera. Everyone else is laughing or looking bored.

Its a useful story because it says so much, the way people react to little things defines them. The way some will exxagerate the importance of little things for some political advantage, belittles them.

Of course, in this case, there is nothing new revealed, but rather confirmed.

The overreaction of uneducated Muslim who are pushed to such displays by their manipulative leadership, ironically, makes me feel more stubborn about what my rights are. I would never think to go out of my way to support a Koran burning but, jeez, why do those Muslims have to get their panties in such a wad...esp. when it hasn't even happened yet. Yet, there I go...hedging with the "esp. when it hasn't even happened yet". We have got to stop having different rules for Muslim sensibilities.

Maybe the little things are all people have in some countries like Pakistan? It's the only outlet that governments allow. And yeah, we need to be less sensitive to Muslim sensitivities, but I guess when generals think lives are at stake, one does hesitate.

Overblogging - it's good to know our limitations (only Eastwood quote that is really meaningful to me). I only wish commenters could know theirs too.

No one would have heard of this guy, and certainly the people in Afghanistan would not have, unless all kinds of media attention came his way. The media wants the panic. They want the riots. They want the chaos. They stir it up, then write touching articles about people's responses. The media is evil, I think. Not all people in the media, but in general the commodification of news means the more people who die, the higher the ratings.

So, they look for ways to stir every side up, and those of us who get stirred play nicely into their scheming. Both sides do it. They just choose different issues to rile up both the supposedly "sophisticated" and the supposedly "uncivilized".

The media, in this day and age, are really the worst people in the world. Not because they do the worst things, but because they knowingly and passionate instigate the worst in people, around the world, stirring the chaos. The media dances around the fires of hell, laughing gleefully and clapping when every building burns and every woman is stoned and every man blows himself and innocent children up.

You know who wants this kind of chaos? The media is the devil in our midst, and we're all too distracted by our partisan topics to really focus our ire against the ones who salivate at the possibility of death and destruction.

Lincolntf:"Now that that's out of the way, let's look at the reactions to the proposal from everyone from the President to the AP to the Dept of Defense to Interpol. Standard issue Christophobia from each and every one of them. People are beginning to notice."

I see it the other way. It's highlighting the issue that people, in general are frightened of a violent reaction from the radical element of Islam.

Look at the way Britain has become Muslimized; Koran on top shelf at libraries, non-co-ed gym classes, a lot of Sharia legal courts. How many of these were assented to based on fear of violence?

Well there is the beginning of this comment from Richard Dolan on the other thread:

Richard Dolan said...Ironside makes an interesting point -- it's a mistake to keep thinking of this incident in domestic terms. There's a description of the timeline of the "Quran burning" story at RCP. In short, the story first got wide coverage starting with al-Arabiya in August (picking up on a release by CAIR), and from there spread to the "Sunni Vatican" center in Cairo and elsewhere. Ironside says that it also got wide play in Pakistan and Indonesia in August.

Anyways- cripes Obama is giving a press conference in the East Room and he's blaming Republicans for holding up all kinds of things.

It's as if he and the media have forgotten how Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid got their jobs...

So how did the proposed Koran burning by a small town Florida pastor become news?

Did he contact the media?

Whose agenda does it serve for such wide-spread publicity?

Not to get too conspiratorial, but was the pending event brought to media attention by gov officials in order to provide grandstanding opportunities(e.g.,Hillary, Obama blah, blahing about religious freedoms in the US) and/or to avert attention from other issues?

Or was it just a slow news day with media tired of same old 'flagging economy' stories?

Nowadays, the press values itself as entertainment rather than its journalism and swindlers, showmen and opportunists have moved in to make easy marks of them by giving them what they need. Now, everybody wins! Money feeds the attention-getters . Attention-getters make the ratings. It’s a nice, closed system .

In The Day after Tomorrow there is a scene in the New York Library where survivors burn books to keep from freezing to death.

Well the one atheist dude wouldn't let them burn the Gutenburg Bible.

But this is a great scene.

Jeremy: Friedrich Nietzsche? We cannot burn Friedrich Nietzsche! He was the most important thinker of the 19th century!Elsa: Oh, please! Nietzsche was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister.Jeremy: He was not a chauvinist pig!Elsa: But he was in love with his sister.Brian: Uh, excuse me, you guys? Yeah. There's a whole section on tax law down here that we can burn.

Elsa: What have you got there?Jeremy: A Gutenberg Bible. It was in the rare books room.Elsa: You think God's gonna save you?Jeremy: No, I don't believe in God.Elsa: You're holding onto that bible pretty tight.Jeremy: I'm protecting it. [Glares at Sam] This Bible is the first book ever printed. It represents the dawn of the Age of Reason. As far as I'm concerned, the written word is mankind's greatest achievement. You can laugh. But if Western civilization is finished, I'm gonna save at least one little piece of it.

Now there is something that should send lefties in a mouth frothing frenzy. An atheist who cherishes a bible because it represents what he believes is the dawn of Western Civilization. Hmmm...Western Civ and a bible two things that lefties tend to despise.

Today on my way to work I passed large groups of Muslim men talking out in front of the mosques on Atlantic Avenue. Today must be some kind of religious event of some sort as they were all dressed in their go to mosque clothes.

Don't blame the incompatant press. Al-Qaeda was pushing the quran burning story on their chat rooms a month ago. The press only caught up a few days ago. Muslims don't need the press to tell them when to riot and why. As I said in the original QB post, it doesn't matter if the quran is burned or not. The thought of qurans being burned is all it takes.I've writen the same on many blogs in the last few days and no one has agreed or disagreed. Experts on Submission are now saying the exactly what I've been saying - burning qurans doesn't matter, Muslims are going to riot, just as the NYT photo shows. No burned qurans, riots anyway. It's what barbarian muslims do.

The Korean lady who cuts my hair told me this morning that on her trip to Vancouver last week to see her daughter that the Muslims had 1000+ coming into Vancouver for group prayer/chants. Being a Jew or a Christian is becoming more dangerous in Canada every year. In Canada the gutsy Pastor from Florida would simply be arrested and charged with a hate crime, ordered to pay a high fine to the victims of his free speech, and ordered to never speak again. The Saudi guys are pushing in the UN for a World Law against offending any Muslim by speaking against their miserable allah cult.

Surely if Pastor Terry simply declared himself a performance artist he could get the NEA to fund his stunt.

Or would he have to put Muhammad in a jar of his urine to qualify?

In either case I'm sure the Left, as principled as they are, would be falling all over themselves to support him and declare anyone that considers the Artist Formerly Known as Pastor Terry's transgressive and provocative (the good kind or provacative!) pieces offensive to an inbred, WalMart-shopping, Pharisee from flyover country that wouldn't understand postmodernism if it smeared elephant dung all over their Mickey Mouse t-shirt and matching fanny pack.

We have to countenance the Middle Finger Mosque because not doing so will "incite radical, violent behavior among Muslims." But we have to stifle people like Terry Jones because his stupid acts will "incite radical, violent behavior among Muslims," and threaten harm to our troops.

I'm not sure what options we have left. Why don't we just withdraw from all dealings with these radical, violent people and send the ones here back where they came from. Think how much we could save in blood and treasure by just disengaging from the world of radical, violent madmen.

At some point, though, it would seem that we have to quit running from these mobs and make a stand. I don't advocate burning Korans, since it's childish and feckless, but I don't think we should keep being intimidated by fears of riots in Muslim countries. That's just appeasement. Maybe they need to start worrying about offending us.

Obama is like the housewife who spends all day making a liver souffle and then whines and pouts when her family who never asked for a liver souffle and refuses to eat that slop.

Worse.....Obama is pissed and vindictive because we don't want to eat the liver souffle so he is going to damned well make sure we eat it and force it on us every night for dinner until we all die of either starvation or toxic poisoning from the moldy souffle.

PZ said... Instead of burning a Koran, why not read it?======================Good idea!My suggestion is you wait until you have to work in Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan - because you won't be allowed to read any other religious material.And DON'T go out pressing your spare bibles on the locals, encouraging them to read it. THat is risky, not just in the abovesaid countries, but also Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Indonesia these days.

Y'all must pardon me but I believe that a crowd chanting Death To america should be answered by death from America. Until we rebuild the Napalm refinery a pattern of cluster bombs will do.

How about we kill those mofos until the only thing they say is God! Please stop! Over the long run it will cut down on total casualties. We need to elect people who value US lives over the feeeelings of a bunch of eigth Century woman beaters.

The problem with all of this is sample size relative to the general population. Yes, you saw the Moslems shaking their fists in rage. Yes, the pastor is a nut. So what? In any population of, say, 10,000, I can find plenty of crazies and if I film them, but don't film the ordinary people, I can make it seem like their whole community is quite mad.

I'd suggest that these images are being chosen to denigrate religion. I go to a fairly large Catholic church in San Diego. In the last couple of weeks we had one speaker from Rachel's Hope, a place where women who have underone an abortion can get counseling and consoling and a speaker who was a recent college graduate on her way to work with the poor in Equador. We've never had anyone yelling or shaking fists.

The more I think about Obama's failure to recognize his own contradiction here, and what that could mean for our politics and society (extending relativism without acknowledging the real dangers of Islam and our own freedoms here) the more upset I get.

This is a precious freedom we have (and it will be abused by the unwise), and it needs a defense, and it need not capitulate to the violent (even the poorest, angriest most brainwashed kid in the wreck of say, A Yemeni economy)....

When an institution prides itself on being a gatekeeper, on speaking Truth to Power, and has a near messianic institutional mythos of moral righteousness... yes, it can be blamed for a civilizational failure.

There is, after all, a huge market demand for drugs. We do not excuse the people who sell them because the real guilt belongs to the consumer. And at least with *drugs* there sometimes is someone holding a gun to the head of the distributor.

No so with the media, with "journalists", with Oprah or anyone else.

No one forced the editor of Newsweek to print a story based on hearsay and lies and no one forced the rioters to kill anyone.

The pen is mightier than the sword!

But somehow expecting, oh, any discretion at all in how it is wielded is an undue burden? A gun is a powerful thing, too, and we don't excuse someone who just fires one all over the place and then claims not to be responsible for what gets hit.

Except no one would be stupid enough to claim that, like freedom of the press, the freedom to bear arms includes not being responsible for anything that gets broken.

Are we really self-censoring because we don't want to offend the Mohammedans? They want to say we shouldn't blame the destruction of the Twin Towers on Muslims because it was only a small radical group responsible, and the rest of us are peaceful, loving kinds of people. Then when a small, radical bizarre religious group in America does something perverse, they are all ready to bring death to America and all Americans. Really? And look at the outrage in the Muslim world. They are really worked up over this.

I disagree with burning the Koran because, in general, I disagree with provoking others for no good reason. However, they are provoking us, repeatedly. The Ground Zero Mosque is to be built at an address damaged by debris from one of the planes used in the attack. It too is part of the battle site. (We lost that battle.) We do not need to stand by and tolerate those who would destroy us. Have none of you ever been attacked by a bully? Bully's use threatening language first, gauging the victims response, and then escalate the violence. Part of the Greater Islam Plan is to infiltrate our society, first apply Sharia to each other, and then to us.

The Constitution of the United States, which our President refuses to uphold, is not a suicide pact. The Democrats have removed impeachment as an option by their refusal to impeach Clinton.

The man's a grifter, one who was scamming many people in Germany out of a fortune in free labor & money before this stunt.

He's not doing this despite death-threats - he's doing it TO GET death-threats. This is exactly the kind of situation a con-artist will use to justify hitting the road & evading their latest big batch of freshly-milked victims when the heat comes down on them.

K T Cat: "Yes, you saw the Moslems shaking their fists in rage. Yes, the pastor is a nut. So what? In any population of, say, 10,000, I can find plenty of crazies and if I film them, but don't film the ordinary people, I can make it seem like their whole community is quite mad.

I'd suggest that these images are being chosen to denigrate religion."

A poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland in 2007 covered four Muslim countries — Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia — that are closely allied with the U.S. The populations of these nations are, on average, slightly more liberal politically than the mean of that of other Muslim populations.

Muslims in these countries were asked whether they support the attitudes and actions of those like Osama Bin Laden against America.

How did they (Muslims in these four nations) respond?

26% said they opposed al Qaeda’s attacks and its attitudes.

15% said they supported both the attacks and the attitudes behind them.

23% said they opposed the attacks but tended to share the attitudes.

A rational person would see that 15% of the population of these U.S.-aligned countries supporting al Qaeda’s deeds is disturbing, to say the least.

Moreover, adding together those who support al Qaeda’s attacks and those who oppose the attacks but support its attitudes shows that, by a ratio of 3 to 2, most respondents said they shared al Qaeda’s attitudes toward the U.S."

Those four nations represent a very large swath of the diversity of Islam and 60%, by their own admission, support/share Al Qaeda's attitudes toward the U.S.

These results have meaning and are significant in what they indicate about the Muslim world.

With so many Muslims espousing support for radicals like Bin Laden, non-Muslims are justified in being at least wary of the Islamic world.

This brings to mind the saying, "Public declaration of being offended is a form of aggression."

Indignation becomes a form of aggression.

Far too much of this indignation is posturing, a form of aggression.

I yearn for the good-old-days: "I challenge you to a dual!"

So much of this is posturing:

Threatening to burn a revered book.

Threatening to burn a flag or other item that deserves respect.

Making a big deal about denouncing such activities.

Outdoing the denouncer by burning something down in retaliation - - the tit-for-tat approach.

We now witness so much of this premeditated posturing, in so many different forms, that anyone is justified in getting "offended," in multiple ways, on any given day. So the challenge lies in living life without being distracted; distracted by the innumerable folks who labor so diligently at making a spectacle of themselves.

Yes, these many different groups are, essentially, determined to create spectacles. The word "symbiosis" comes to mind.

An indignant thirty year old can engage in bellicose posturing and gain respect; a comparable indignant three year old would be said to throw a tantrum. That is how the world goes around.

About F15c: The Moors conquered Spain as Muslims. Through a series of crusades, the Christians removed them. In the end, they forced all remaining Muslims to leave. This was an act of generosity: they could have exercised "ethnic cleansing". What the Spaniards found was that many Muslims who claimed to convert to Christianity had not, and when a Muslim army re-appeared, so did their Muslim identity. The whole point of the Inquisition was to verify the strength of the conversion.

When members of a minority group refuse to support the law by identifying group members outside of the law, then there is a problem. We have this when Blacks won't testify against other Blacks. We have this when Muslims shelter Muslims against non-Muslims. Part of the Muslim faith instructs members to be subservient when in the minority. When the time is right, they can demonstrate their true colors. Does this mean all Muslims are terrorists? No. Does it mean that it will take a lot of courage for a Muslim to squeal on another Muslim? Yes. The repercussions are huge. The snitch is ostracized by their old community, yet chances are there isn't a new, welcoming community.

Just saw another shoot 'em up guy film. More than once, the good guys had the drop on the villains, who just seconds earlier were trying to kill said good guys, and the good guys wouldn't shoot the bad guys. Hello, they are trying to kill you! When we are done dealing with Islam, we have China, which is growing as a world power. These cultures are very different from Western Culture. They have a different sense of right and wrong, and what constitutes "fair play". In our culture, "a man's word is his bond". But those other cultures may not play that way. We need to be alert.

I used to teach high school. Once, two of my African-American students had gotten into a fight at the local Burger King after a football game. One had actually tried to run down the other with a car, and then had chased the other while displaying a big knife. The mostly White police had estimated a crowd of about 150 bystanders. After they had questioned about 100 of them to no avail, they decided that "No one had seen anything." Race is an important part of that story, and continues to be an important part of our story. Islam, by the way, is a religion, not a race. So those who oppose Islam are not racist. There are Jews and Christians of Middle-Eastern descent.